Since I'm probably not brewing in November and December of this year, I only have 4 brew days available to me before I need to submit my entry for MCAB 14. As of now my plan is to brew the beer twice and tweak the recipe in-between batches, if needed. Today was the first batch, which was also my first attempt at no sparge brewing. A bunch of firsts!
In terms of grist, this batch is only slightly different than original recipe. As per my malt tests, I went with a blend of Mild Malt and Golden Promise for the base. And to address the judges' complaint that the original beer was too roasty, I dropped some of the Pale Chocolate in favor of Aromatic, which should also boost this batch's malt flavors. OG is a touch higher, IBUs are a touch lower. But it's not a radical departure from the original recipe.
The big change was in process since I decided to skip sparging. I'd never tried this before so I had no idea what effect it would have on my efficiency. Looking at other brewers' experience I guessed that I would get about 55% efficiency from an un-sparged mash. This turned out to be a bit optimistic -- actual efficiency was around 45% and my pre-boil gravity was 7 points lower than I wanted. Thankfully I keep bags of DME nearby for just such problems, so I was still able to hit my target OG.
The weather around here is starting to cool so I can let this beer ferment in the basement using only a fermwrap, no need to stick it in the fermentation fridge. But the water is still too warm to cool efficiently. Today I tried a new approach -- I hooked up the immersion chiller to a pump, which was sitting in a bucket of ice water. The pump pushed ice water through the chiller and into the sink which the kettle was sitting. Then I used a siphon tube to move the water from the sink back into the bucket. If I could add a whirlpool chiller to this setup I'd have a very fast, but very complex way to chill down wort.
The yeast in this batch is a repitch from the stout I made two weeks ago. I'm still not comfortable with my process for harvesting and washing yeast, so I didn't intend to repitch for this batch. But my local homebrew store was sold out of Wyeast 1318 leaving me very little choice.